


I'll Take You There Someday

by Allamarain



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Bad Wolf, Coping Mechanisms, F/F, Grief, Oncoming blondes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 12:58:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18873658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allamarain/pseuds/Allamarain
Summary: She heard a crackle, and looked over. She saw the faintest outline in the light. She needed to provide more energy.  The rest of the lighting in the console room dimmed.That should do it...A few minutes later, the outline took form, ethereal, ghost-like, still bathed in the light. A familiar face. The Doctor’s face lit up.“Hi Rose.” she beamed.





	I'll Take You There Someday

A circle of bright white light came through the console room floor as the Doctor adjusted the dials and knobs on the console. She muttered to herself as she continued to make adjustments. _This has to work tonight. It just has to._

She heard a crackle, and looked over. She saw the faintest outline in the light. She needed to provide more energy. At this late hour, her friends were all in bed, so turning off a few things shouldn’t be an issue. The rest of the lighting in the console room dimmed. _That should do it…_

A few minutes later, the outline took form, ethereal, ghost-like, still bathed in the light. A familiar face. The Doctor’s face lit up.

“Hi Rose.” she beamed.

“Doctor?” Her eyes widened as she looked down at her nearly transparent body. “What happened?”

“You were caught by a transmat again. I managed to block it, but there was a malfunction. You’re out of sync with time, just by one second. Right now, you’re contained within a stasis field to keep all your atoms from dispersing. Also, because you’re not fully in sync yet, you’re sort of here and not here. You can’t touch anything, you’d pass right through.”

She furrowed her brow. “Can you fix it?”

“Yeah, workin’ on it. It’s gonna take some time.” She fiddled with a knob, not taking her eyes off Rose. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

The tension in her face eased. She looked around. “It looks different in here. What happened?”

“You’ve been gone a while, actually.” The Doctor grabbed her tea mug and took a seat closer to Rose. “Long story. I’ll explain later.” 

“Did I miss anything good?” 

“Oh, loads! Went to this amazing planet the other day. Saw a giant slug. Took up a whole caldera. Huge!” she spread her arms out, spilling a little tea as she did. 

“I wish I could have seen it.” Rose was wistful.

“I’ll take you there someday.” The Doctor told her. “After that, we went to The Green Planet. Everything was green. The plants, the animals, the sky-everything!” 

“’We’?” Rose raised an eyebrow. “I’m gone for a bit, and you replace me?”

“Of course not. No one could ever replace you.” She tried to keep the quiver out of her voice. “But I made some new friends. They’re amazing, and clever, and brave. You’d love them.”

“Are they traveling with you?” she asked.

“Yeah, but they’re all asleep right now. It’s late.” 

“What else have you been up to, with these new friends of yours?” 

“Missing you,” she said under her breath. Aloud, she said, “Let me tell you what happened today…”

 

—  
Graham was no stranger to insomnia. When he had worked late shifts, it would take forever for him to unwind enough afterward to be able to sleep. Then of course, traveling with the Doctor, it was hard to judge the passage of time and his sleep cycle was all messed up. Physically, he was exhausted. But mentally, he kept thinking of those horrid winged beasts they’d encountered earlier. Staying in bed was doing him no good. He decided to get up for a walk.

He stepped out into the corridor, and noted the lights were dim, which he’d never seen before. He also heard some voices coming from the console room. Two voices. Both women. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. At first he thought it was the Doctor and Yaz, because they liked to stay up and talk sometimes. He strained to listen, and heard the Doctor’s voice, but the second was unfamiliar to him. Was there someone else aboard? He carefully walked down the darkened corridor. As he drew closer, he noticed a white light, flickering, coming from the console room.

He stood in the doorway and saw a ghost. 

She was a young woman, about Ryan’s age, bathed in a cylinder of light. But he could see through her. She had blonde hair that went past her shoulders, and wore a red jacket and black trousers. Her feet were several inches off the ground. Her eyes were fixed on the Doctor, who was standing in front of the console and gesturing wildly, in the middle of yet another animated rambling. The young woman’s lips were parted and smiling.

“…so I’m stuck there, in the middle of the forest, supposed to be New London, but there’s nothin’ around at all, not a single sign of civilization…”

“You landed in the wrong year again!” The girl clasped her hands and laughed.

“I did not!” The Doctor was indignant. “I landed in the wrong hemisphere.” She added, quietly. 

The girl rolled her eyes. “I could fly the TARDIS better than you.”

“Anyway,” the Doctor continued “I figured out I was in the wrong place when the indigenous people showed up and I had to explain the distress beacon I built. I told them I was trying to reach someone in the sky. Then, I had to stop them from takin’ it as an offering to their god!”

The girl laughed again. 

“Doc, what’s going on?” Graham asked.

The Doctor jumped, knocking over her empty tea cup. She turned around. “What’re you doing up!?” 

“Couldn’t sleep.” He walked into the console room. “Who’s she?” 

The girl looked him over and smiled. “You must be one of the Doctor’s new friends. Hi, I’m Rose.” She waved. “I’d shake your hand, if I could.”

“Graham.” He replied. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“So the Doctor hasn’t told you about me?” she asked.

“No, sorry.” The Doctor didn’t talk that much about her life outside of them, but she was full of surprises. “She hasn’t introduced us to many of her other friends yet.”

“Well, I’ve been on the TARDIS for quite a while now. Apparently I’m in danger of detmaterializing at the moment,” she gestured to her nearly transparent form. “But once this is fixed, I’ll be traveling with all of you. The Doctor’s working on it now.” 

Graham glanced over at the Doctor, who was gripping the edges of the console, watching a display. “Power draining..ugh.” 

“Is everything okay?” Rose asked with a hint of wory.

“Yeah, just need to make a slight adjustment.” The Doctor flipped a few switches, and Rose disappeared, though the light remained.

“Doc, what happened to her?!” Graham tried not to panic. “What do we do? Can we get her back?”

“Graham, it’s okay. She’s not real.” The Doctor’s voice was quiet as looked down at the console, her shoulders slumped.

“It ain’t the Solitract again, is it?!” That thing had been unnverving enough the first time.

“No, no, nothing like that. Nothin’ dangerous. It’s just a simulation.”

Now he was throughly confused. “What, you mean like an AI?”

“Sort of.” She looked up at him, an uncharacteristic weariness in her demeanor. “Rose traveled with me a long time ago. Centuries, in fact.” 

Well, that confirmed his suspicion the Doctor was older than she looked. “She looked pretty recent,” he remarked.

“It was centuries for me, but I met her in the mid-2000s. And there was this thing that happened to her. See, we were facing Daleks, thousands of them, surrounding this space station…”

She launched into a long story involving too many details he didn’t understand. She paused when he gave her his best “get to the point” face.

“Anyway, Rose looked into the heart of the TARDIS. Which made a virtual copy of her. Her emotions, her memories, mannerisms, everything she was up to that point. And that’s what you saw.” She pointed at the space where Rose had been. “Well, a hologram, combined with that copy.”

“Can it-she-” he hastily corrected himself, “do that for anyone?” 

“The TARDIS can make a hologram of anybody that has entered her, but those can only do system warnings and prerecorded messages. If they’ve been in contact with the telepathic circuits, she can do a little more. A memory or two. But something this complex, a person has to be directly in contact with the heart. It's very dangerous. Rose nearly died from it.” She paused before continuing. “The simulation…she looks like Rose, has her personality, has her memories, and can interact with actual people. It’s a good simulation. But that’s all it is. She doesn’t even realize she’s not really Rose.” 

“What happened to her?” He was almost afraid to ask.

“Stuck in a parallel universe. ‘S OK though. She’s not alone.” Her voice sounded of forced cheerfulness.

“And you come talk to her? All this time?”

“Yeah. The simulation takes a lot of power to run, so I can’t do it that often. But I tell her about places I’ve visited-she loved that-things I’ve doing, people I’ve met, and it’s like she’s aboard the TARDIS with me again. And it gives me a chance to say…the things I need to say to her.” She gave him a look that was achingly familiar, a look he recognized in himself. One he’d had many times since he’d lost his wife.

They were both quiet for a few moments. “If I had something like this for Grace.” He said softly. “I’d never turn it off.”

“You would though. Eventually.” Her voice hardened. “You want to be with people that will grow with you. Challenge you. I have changed so much since I lost her. This simulation? She’ll never change. She can’t form new memories. Whenever I boot her up, I make up something to explain why she’s stuck in place and transparent. The TARDIS makes sure she always recognizes me-I met her a few bodies ago-but other than that, she’s a clean slate every time.” She sighed. “Hadn’t talked to her in a while, actually. But today…those creatures we saw-the Krillitane-the last time I faced them I was with her. And times like that, when everything is reminding me of her…this helps. I think you understand.”

“Yeah.” Graham increasingly felt like he was intruding on the Doctor’s privacy. He should leave. He vowed silently not tell the kids about this. “I’m gonna go. Try getting some sleep.” 

“I should see what caused the power drain. May need to refuel before settin’ out tomorrow.” She forced a smile.

He turned to leave, then stopped and turned around. _Centuries_. He had to know. “Doc, losing someone you…well, does it ever get better?”

She held his gaze, her expression full of heartache. “It gets easier. You get used to it. But I’m sorry…I can’t say it ever gets better.”

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Laurie Frankel's novel _Goodbye For Now_.


End file.
